Gabby Giffords asks: 'What is Congress afraid of?'

Former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is making a personal plea to Congress: Get off the dime and enact gun control legislation.

“What is Congress afraid of?” Giffords ask as she slowly enunciates her words in a new TV ad that will air during President Obama’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday night. “Tell Washington it’s too dangerous to wait.”

Gabrielle Giffords (Tom Uhlman, AP)

The ad is paid for by Americans for Responsible Solutions, the PAC co-founded by the former Arizona congresswoman and her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly. Giffords and Kelly have been pushing Congress to pass expanded background checks for gun buyers — an effort that failed in the Senate last year.

Watching and listening to Giffords is always a gut check if you remember how she was shot in the head at point-blank range in January 2011 while meeting with her constituents at a Tucson grocery store. Six people died and Giffords suffered grievous injuries, including a loss of speech, which she is still battling to overcome three years later.